LAX terminal reopens after mass shooting

Terminal 3 at Los Angeles International Airport re-opened Saturday after a rifle-wielding gunman killed a Transportation Security Administration officer, injured two others and fired a barrage of shots Friday morning before police shot him and took him into custody.

The suspect, Los Angeles resident Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, has been charged with first-degree murder by federal prosecutors. He was shot four times by airport police, wounding him in the mouth and leg, and remained in hospital in an unknown condition.

Airport operations are returning to normal, the Associated Press reported, following the cancellation of hundreds of flights and disruption to nationwide flight schedules. Some 1,550 flights with 167,000 passengers were affected, LAX spokeswoman Nancy Castles said in a statement, according to the AP.

The shooting caused chaos in the world’s sixth-busiest airport and gave the nation yet another burst of gun-fueled violence less than a year after the mass shootings at a school in Newtown, Conn., and a month and a half after the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard.

The AP described Ciancia as a “man from New Jersey who wrote a rant about killing Transportation Safety Administration workers.”

The news service said he wore fatigues and had a bag containing a hand-written note that said he “wanted to kill TSA and pigs,” and had talked about suicide in a text to a relative. The note contained possible references to conspiracy theories that foresee a one-world government, the AP reported.

The bag also contained hundreds of rounds of ammunition for the semi-automatic rifle Ciancia used in the shooting.

Ciancia had earlier sent a text message to a sibling “in reference to him taking his own life,” Pennsville, N.J., police Chief Allen Cummings told the AP. The chief said Ciancia’s father called him early Friday afternoon asking for help locating his son. Cummings said he called Los Angeles police, who sent a patrol car to Ciancia’s apartment, where two roommates said they had seen him Thursday and that he was fine.

Friday’s incident also brought a flurry of conflicting news reports, including disputed information on whether the gunman had been killed. NBC News’s Pete Williams said on the air that the suspect had no connection to the TSA, despite some news organizations’ claims that he may have been an employee of the agency.

Authorities said the incident began around 12:20 p.m. EDT, when the shooter pulled an assault rifle out of a bag and began firing. He made his way past the initial TSA checkpoint and continued well into the terminal before an airport police officer shot him, airport police chief Patrick Gannon said. Officials said the incident ended about 30 minutes after the first shots were fired.

One witness, Leon Saryan, told MSNBC that the gunman had been walking calmly amid the turmoil. He told the network that the gunman approached him with a one-word question: “TSA?”

Gannon said authorities believed only one shooter was involved. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said the situation at the airport was now “static.”

The FBI, which has jurisdiction over crimes targeting federal employees, is leading the investigation.

A fire official said at a news conference that seven patients were treated for injuries and six were transported to hospitals. UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center said it received three male patients, one of whom arrived in critical condition.

President Barack Obama expressed concern about the shooting but declined to say much about it.

“Obviously, we’ve been monitoring it, we’re concerned about it, but I’ll let the law-enforcement folks talk about it directly,” Obama said at the end of an Oval Office meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.